Program Notes: Mahler Symphony No. 1

BENJAMIN BRITTEN 
Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 13 (1945 revision) 
BORN: November 22, 1913, Lowestoft, England 
DIED: December 4, 1976, Aldeburgh, England 
WORK COMPOSED: 1938, revised 1945 
WORLD PREMIERE: August 18, 1938, in London, with the composer performing as soloist and Henry Wood conducting the London Promenade Concert orchestra (now known as BBC Proms). The revised version was first played at the Cheltenham Music Festival on July 2, 1946; Australian pianist Noel Mewton-Wood performed as soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra. 
SEATTLE SYMPHONY PREMIERE: Thursday, November 14, 2024, with conductor Nicholas Carter and the Symphony joined by pianist Benjamin Grosvenor. 

What to Listen For: 

• Although athletic piano passages are its most obvious attraction, this concerto also features imaginative orchestral sonorities. Notice, for example, the unusual duo between muted viola and piccolo at the start of the second movement. And the finale brings a passage inventively scored for piano accompanied only by bass drum cymbals. 

Although athletic piano passages are its most obvious attraction, this concerto also features imaginative orchestral sonorities. Notice, for example, the unusual duo between muted viola and piccolo at the start of the second movement. And the finale brings a passage inventively scored for piano accompanied only by bass drum cymbals. 

This concert presents music by two major composers, both pieces written early in their careers. The first is by Benjamin Britten, who would become the foremost English composer of the mid-20th century. Britten composed his Piano Concerto in 1938 and revised it in 1945. Although he optimistically titled the work “Piano Concerto No. 1,” Britten never produced another. 

The piece features two important aspects of the composer’s musical artistry. The first is his precocious development. Britten was only 24 years of age when he wrote the initial version of the concerto, yet the work displays an assured command of both keyboard and orchestral writing, and of compositional form and procedure, far beyond what one might expect of so young a musician. As a boy, Britten had studied with Frank Bridge, an English composer who imparted the fastidious professionalism he himself had cultivated. After completing additional studies at the Royal College of Music, England’s leading conservatory, Britten spent time in continental Europe, encountering firsthand some of the trends that were reshaping music at that time. All this helps explain the appearance of such a highly accomplished concerto so early in his career. 

The other facet of Britten’s musicianship reflected in this work is his own considerable ability as a pianist. Like many prominent pianist-composers before him — Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Liszt and Brahms, for example — Britten wrote his concerto with an eye to performing the solo part himself. He did so at the work’s London premiere, in the summer of 1938, and subsequently in the United States, where he spent some three years beginning in 1939. Britten later grew reticent about performing in public, limiting himself to accompanying singers, particularly Peter Pears, the English tenor who became his lifelong companion. But the dazzling passages we hear in his concerto show how brilliantly he played as a young man. 

Piano virtuosity is a chief component of the concerto’s opening movement. Its title, Toccata: Allegro molto e con brio, indicates a Baroque-period keyboard genre marked by rapid rhythms and driving figuration, and Britten gives us just that in modern dress. Lyrical contributions from the orchestra provide just enough contrast. A cadenza solo leads to a surprisingly quiet interlude, then a quick, energetic conclusion. 

The second movement begins with a striking combination of orchestral colors, as muted viola, piccolo and clarinet introduce a gentle waltz melody. The soloist takes the music briefly in a more energetic direction, but calm is restored in the end. 

Britten composed the ensuing Impromptu: Andante lento in 1945 to replace the original third movement, which he discarded. It presents a meditative set of variations on the melody presented by the piano in its opening moments. 

The concluding March: Allegro moderato, sempre alla marcia begins quietly, almost tentatively, and includes recollections of previous portions of the composition. Eventually, the music builds to a level of intensity rivaling that of the first movement. 

GUSTAV MAHLER 
Symphony No. 1 in D Major 
BORN: July 7, 1860, in Kalište, Bohemia 
DIED: May 18, 1911, in Vienna, Austria 
WORK COMPOSED: 1888 
WORLD PREMIERE: November 20, 1889, in Budapest. Mahler, an outstanding conductor as well as a composer, directed. 

What to Listen For: 

• This symphony opens with a quiet introduction that constitutes an uncanny bit of nature music. Here, Mahler evokes the first light of dawn with sustained tones spanning nearly the full compass of the orchestra; bird calls and distant bugles suggest the world awakening to a new day. 

• The third movement begins with a melody that seems a minor-key variant of “Frère Jacques.” Later, cymbals punctuate another minor-key melody to evoke the sound of klezmer, the musical tradition of Eastern and Central European Ashkenazi Jews. 

Composers of the late 19th century generally did not rush hastily into symphonic composition. Bruckner was 42 when he brought forth his First Symphony, Brahms even older. It is notable, therefore, that Gustav Mahler began his career as one of the great symphonists while still in his 20s. His Symphony No. 1 dates from 1888, though sketches for it may have been made as early as 1884. 

But what is truly remarkable about this symphony is not the youth of its author but the maturity of the music — more precisely, that so many of the traits that would distinguish Mahler’s symphonic output are already in place. We find here the novel orchestration the composer used with such mastery throughout his career, especially when evoking a haunting, macabre atmosphere. The borrowings from “everyday” music — bugle calls, bird songs, dance tunes and the like — which contribute so much to the character of Mahler’s style, also are very much part of this First Symphony. And here the composer initiates the practice of using his own songs as a source of melodic material, a procedure he would continue through his next four symphonies. Finally, this symphony, like all Mahler’s music, is to some extent an autobiographical work, a fact the composer made explicit in the title and elaborate written program he attached to the score. 

This last requires some comment. Mahler once said of his first two symphonies: “My whole life is contained in them; I have set down in them all my experience.” With regard to the First Symphony in particular, we can note that the title “Titan” derives from a novel of the same name by the early Romantic author Jean Paul Richter, whom Mahler greatly admired (as had Robert Schumann). Richter’s Titan concerns a familiar kind of protagonist: a passionate, dream-driven man of the type so frequently extolled by the early Romantic poets. Mahler evidently identified with this fictional character and appropriated him as a kind of alter ego. And there can be little doubt that he imagined himself, no less than Richter’s hero, as the “Titan” of the symphony’s one-time title. 

If Mahler actually did conceive his first symphonic composition as an account of his life and experience, he nevertheless rendered this musical autobiography in highly poetic terms. That remains true even if we consider the program, the dramatic scenario, that Mahler wrote to explain the work. (After the symphony received only lukewarm response at its premiere, he decided that listeners might be more sympathetic if they could attach some specific dramatic significance to the music.) According to this document, the first movement represents “Spring — the awakening of nature at dawn.” In the ensuing scherzo, Mahler’s hero sets out “Under full sail.” The third movement finds him “shipwrecked” and a participant in a “huntsman’s funeral.” The finale recounts his progress “dall’ Inferno al Paradiso” (“From Hell to Paradise”). 

Mahler later withdrew both this program and the title “Titan,” and rebuffed attempts to interpret his works too literally. But his attitude toward the concept of program music remained complex and ambiguous, and it was perhaps best summarized in a letter to a colleague in which he asserted: “There exists no modern music which hasn’t its inner program. But no music is worth anything when the listener must be instructed as to what is to be experienced in it.” 

Regardless of Mahler’s narrative program for the symphony, the opening measures stand as one of the most beautiful passages of nature music in orchestral literature. The initial moments, with their sustained tones in the strings (so high, so deep, so still), evoke the nascent light of daybreak. Against this background we soon hear the first rustling sounds of the new morning: distant bugle fanfares, the call of a cuckoo. That last motif soon transforms itself into the first notes of the principal theme as the movement truly gets under way. This long and flowing melody derives from the second of Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, composed several years prior to the symphony, and the cuckoo-call motif is never long absent. Other sounds from the introductory paragraph also recur midway through the movement. 

The second movement’s scherzo begins in the manner of a rustic folk dance, but the music takes on a fantastic character. A contrasting central section brings a dream-like waltz. 

Next comes a startling slow movement. Mahler declared that this music was suggested by an illustration in a children’s book depicting a dead hunter being borne to his grave by a procession of forest animals. It begins with the mournful tone of a single muted bass singing a melody that suggests a somber folk song. Other members of the orchestra take up the tune, which, with remarkable control, builds to a spooky funeral march. A second theme gives us a recollection of the klezmer music Mahler heard during his youth, while the movement’s brief central episode brings music of delicate beauty. The eerie atmosphere is relieved during a lyrical central episode, whose melody also comes from the Wayfarer song cycle. 

Mahler described the opening of the finale as “the cry of a wounded heart,” and it is a disturbing outburst indeed. The theme that follows maintains a high degree of tension. By contrast, the second subject conjures a serene dream-world. During the course of the proceedings, we hear reminiscences of melodic ideas from the first two movements; later, Mahler recalls the symphony’s slow introduction. Throughout, the composer juxtaposes strains of violence and despair with others of soaring triumph. The majestic final measures leave no doubt as to the outcome of their struggle: in the end, Mahler upholds the Romantic tradition of the heroic symphony with a triumphant conclusion. 

Paul Schiavo © 2024 

Paul Schiavo has written program notes for the Seattle Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, among others. His work has appeared in Seattle Opera Magazine, the journal of the Richard Strauss Society of the UK, and The American Book Review.